Sunday night's installment raised a lot of big questions by introducing some new characters and threats - and maybe even a budding romance? - but the scream-at-your-screen moment came at the end, when a voice that COULD have been Glenn's croaked "Help!" over Daryl's walkie talkie.

The show has dragged out the fate of our beloved pizza deliveryman-turned-everyman hero for three weeks now, and even I'm starting to waver in my steadfast belief that we saw him ripped apart by zombies in this season's third episode, "Thanks."

Steven Yeun's name is still being left off of the opening credits, but the news that they've cast Negan, an infamous villain in the comics, to make his grand entrance in the season finale strongly suggests we haven't seen the last of Glenn, since these two characters have quite the storyline in the graphic novels.

But I digress.

This episode finally catches up with Daryl, Sasha and Abraham, who have been taking their sweet time returning to Alexandria. Seriously - they're leading the walkers 20 miles away, but they've been gone for a couple of days. Marathons (26.2-mile foot races) don't take this long. What held them up?

Rolling into an ambush, that's what - but as it turns out, the trap wasn't set for them.

It's easy to forget that while we're focusing on the Grimes Gang and their epic showdowns with Wolves and cannibals and a deranged Governor, there's scores of other survivors scrapping through their own battles - and only 20 miles away from Alexandria, some religious zealots have assumed control by promising protection to those who "kneel" in an arrangement that smacks of something you'd see in "Goodfellas."

Protection for a price - but what's left to give anymore?

So our friends are just driving along, almost ready to turn around and head back home, when they're suddenly fired upon. Daryl gets hit - but not too seriously, Dixon's Vixens - and falls off his bike. He manages to climb back on and motor away, with a car hot on his heels. And two more cars rip after Sasha and Abraham. Whirring bullets, car chases - we've detoured from "Zombieland" into "The Dukes of Hazzard."

Sasha and Abraham manage to out-maneuver one car and speed ahead of a second that's on their tail. Abraham is getting off on the excitement, grinning like a mad man. "We won darling!" he tells Sasha - but she's saving the celebration until everyone's back together.

They head back to the little row of buildings where they were attacked, and try tracking Daryl. They can see he got back on his bike and took off ("He caught a God bounce," says Abraham in one of his many, many colorful phrases this week.) Abraham is positive that Daryl's gone on home without them, but Sasha wants to wait it out here, confident that Mr. Dixon will return. They duck into an auto insurance office, and Sasha scrawls "DIXON" on the door to let their friend know that they're waiting inside.

And now they wait. And wait. And we get to see two characters who haven't interacted 1-on-1 much have some pretty telling conversations, which is a treat.

First they try to deduce what the hell happened. There aren't enough people around these parts or coming down that road for this small army to just be waiting around to ambush someone. And it's very unlikely they were watching the Alexandrians and waiting to spring a trap, because Rick's big lead-the-walkers-away plan happened a day ahead of schedule. So someone else must have been in the crosshairs.

But Abraham is antsy. He wanted to kill a walker yards and yards ahead of them on the way in, which Sasha warned him was stupid. "We don't need to leave breadcrumbs," she says. They want Daryl to find them; not the anonymous shooters.

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And inside the office building, there's a shriveled-up walker pacing back and forth inside a glass-walled office - which provides one of the episode's best scares when it suddenly presses against the glass behind Abraham's head. Again, Sasha wants to just let it be. It can't get to them. Relax.

Abraham starts scavenging, and finds a decorated military uniform still freshly-pressed inside a dry cleaning bag, as well as framed pictures of this late serviceman's family, who are probably dead as well. This obviously stirs up a lot of emotions in our military man here, so he's itching to occupy his mind. "You have no idea how much I want to remove that thing from this plane of existence," he says, looking at the walker batting against the glass like a rotting moth.

Behind it, ominously, is a dry erase board with some stream-of-consciousness scrawlings:

"I pray for the world."

"Keeping going."

"Stay cheerful."

"The bites kill..." and this last line is smeared with blood.

But Sasha's in no mood for Abraham's humor. She wants to know why he insisted on coming along in the car with her; she had this under control.

He reminds her that she was pretty out-of-control for a while there (i.e., last season). "You just about took my arm off on the road to Paradise," he says, reminding her of her rampage against the walkers that endangered the group after both Bob and Tyreese died.

Sasha insists that she is in control now - but she thinks Abraham is the one who's losing it. Which is why he wants to kill whatever walkers he can, even when doing so isn't necessary: Because he is obsessed with finding a way to take control.

Here's a man who no longer has a mission, since first his family died, and then he learned Eugene was lying about there being a cure in D.C. Instead of a long-term plan, which has kept him going since the outbreak, lately he's resorted to the one-day-at-a-time plan, which has made him much more reckless - like when he jumped out of the car in the season premiere to corral those straying walkers.

Abraham tries to brush it off as, "Loose ends make my ass itch," (line of the night?) but Sasha's not buying it. These grand acts are just a show of being in control - but in reality, they're a cop out, because he's actually giving up control.

"When you jump out of an airplane ... you don't have choices after that," she tells him. You can play chicken with the ground, but your fight-or-flight survival instinct is going to kick in. And since you've removed the choice of "flight" because, well, you're plummeting to the ground, all that's left is to "fight" - and so you pull the ripcord and open your parachute, and waft safely to the ground.

But deciding to settle down in Alexandria with a roof over his head, and walls safely around him - this kind of security actually gives a man time to think. Which means now he has to make real decisions about what he is going to do next, and how he is going to live out his days.

"You have choices, and without walkers and bullets and sh-t hitting the fan, you're accountable for them," she says, before giving him his first choice: "Stand watch or sleep?"

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He opts to stand watch.

But the next morning, he slips out and nearly succumbs to hiding behind his adrenaline-junkie crutch behavior.

He spies a dead soldier that's turned after crashing into the wall atop an overpass, and getting impaled on a piece of debris. It's dangling above the ground and - pardon me, as I don't know my heavy artillery - but he's got some kind of rocket (like for a bazooka maybe?) strapped to his back.

Abraham rifles through the walker's vehicle, and finds not only a case with more rockets ("Well howdy, gentlemen," he says), but also a box of seven Dona Maria cigars. He's really scored on this scouting mission.

Daryl (pictured), Abraham and Sasha have been leading the walkers 20 miles away - for a while, now. (Gene Page/AMC)

Now, that should be enough to make anyone happy, but he decides to crawl out on the debris, high above the ground, to try and grab the remaining rocket off the snarling walker's back.

In the night's most tense scene, he crawls out on the precarious ledge and comes face-to-face with the walker - and the creature actually paws at Abraham's face. They're nose to nose, and it's incredible that Abraham isn't bitten or scratched.

And then Abraham screams in the walker's face.

Finally, after coming face-to-face with his fears and insecurities, and roaring it all out, Abraham slinks back off the debris and onto the bridge, and lights a cigar.

And as a reward for making the right decision, the walker falls off the pole and splats on the ground below - but the remaining missile is still dangling out there by its strap. So Abraham gets to grab it after all.

He returns victorious with his ammo and his cigars - and hopefully with a new lease on life. He tells Sasha, "I've been kind of living from check to check ... now I believe I'm gonna live."

And then - hey now - he starts laying it on thick for Sasha. Now that he sees "the table is set for the rest of our lives, and I hope for those years to be long and fruitful," he tells her that he likes the way she calls B.S., and he wants to get to know her, "a whole lot better."

Mmmmm-hmmmm.

Sasha asks if this is one of his "plays."

"What makes you think I want that?" she asks him, and he answers, "A man can tell."

She laughs, but the air is suddenly charged - or was it charged all along, and I just didn't notice?

Sasha tells him he's got some things to work out first before she'd even consider that, and he allows that he does.

So let's leave these two lovebirds and catch up with Daryl, who has been stepping into QUITE the mess while Sasha and Abraham were getting into some character development.

Daryl manages to stay on his bike long enough to lose the car that is chasing him. He pulls into the woods and starts driving down a dirt path that might have been a creek bed once. It's hard to say, because these woods have been burnt to a crisp.

He collapses onto the ground, and finds himself lying beside a walker that's more-or-less melted to the ground the way those napalmed zombies (napalmbies!) were back in Atlanta. It's still got its helmet on, though, so it's no real threat to Daryl. He lies on the ground alongside the walker and catches his breath in a scene parallel to - but more peaceful than - Abraham's face-to-face encounter with his walker.

Daryl hides the bike in some underbrush, and assesses his situation. There are charred bodies everywhere, and the woods are completely blackened. He radios for Sasha and Abraham, but he's out of range. He's also bleeding like a stuck pig from his arm - whether he was shot or grazed, I couldn't tell, but Dixon is in rough shape.

He hears something in the woods, however, and comes upon two terrified looking women.

"You found us! Here we are," says the brunette bitterly. "We earned what we took!"

While Daryl tries to parse this out, he's knocked out cold by a man who creeps up behind him.

The short of it is that these three were the people that those ambushers were looking for, which we piece together through snatches of conversation that Daryl overhears as they take him prisoner and steal his crossbow.

He comes to the next morning, and sees he's with a sandy-haired man (I missed his name), a brunette woman and a younger blond woman. They've tied up Daryl's hands in front of him. They assume he's part of the group that was shooting at him, and don't believe Daryl when he tries to them that he isn't who they think he is.

They're taking him as collateral in case they run into those gunmen - who seem to have religious undertones, as this man keeps muttering things like, "You feel you gotta kneel? Fair enough. We don't" - while they are looking for a friend of theirs.

They reveal that they're the ones who burnt down the forest, back at the beginning of the zombie outbreak, which wiped out most of the walkers in the area.

"We thought everyone was fighting them, wherever they were," the man says. "We thought that's what everyone was doing. Fight it, we all win together ... We were stupid."

Daryl - who, bless him, can never keep his mouth shut - tells them they're being stupid right now by keeping him a prisoner. He could HELP them.

The man puts his gun in Daryl's face and asks if he's being stupid in not just killing Daryl right now. He offers another bit of insight into the bullies they're hiding from, which he thinks Daryl is a part of:

"You made a choice to kill for someone else, to have them owing you for a roof over your head and three squares," he mutters. Daryl argues they are not stupid for not killing him, because he's not part of that group, and he is willing to make a deal to help these three survive.

He gets shot down - not literally, thankfully. "You're one of Them. You're hurt and you're alone and you'd say anything. We should've never trusted you people to begin with," says the man.

They reach a lot ringed by a chainlink fence, and Daryl's three captors are devastated that their friend Patty isn't there anymore. As they try to come up with a new plan, the blond girl faints. While the older man and woman are distracted in helping her, Daryl grabs their back with his crossbow in it and takes off through the woods. Nice.

He manages to free his hands and grab the walkie, but Sasha and Abraham are still out of range. A walker comes out at him, which I dub the "Chia Pet walker" because its body has fused with nature; leaves and moss are growing out of it, and Daryl just manages to free his crossbow in time to kill it for Zombie Kill of the Week.

There's something else in that duffle bag, though - a cooler with insulin.

Sigh - that blond girl is diabetic. And Daryl is a softie, so of course he goes back to his three kidnappers, who are sitting on a log near where he left them, looking defeated.

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Holding them at crossbow-point, he gets them to hand over the gun, and he gives them back the bag and the meds. But he demands the little figurine that the sandy-haired man was carving, as well as keeping the gun. "Good luck - you're gonna need it," Daryl tells them, and is about to walk away -

-when a truck comes crashing through the trees. The gunmen have found them.

Daryl hides and listens in as a few heavily armed men step out - we only see them from the waist down - and say bully-like epithets like, "Let's end this," and "You're going to return what you took."

The brunette yells back that whatever it is they have (I'm thinking it was the insulin) it's theirs by right because they earned it. But alas, running away has added interest on top of their debt. "You're going to pay for the gas it took to come out here, and all the time we took," warns the leader. "You know the rules."

But they give our new antagonist a name with a spirited retort of, "We're not going back, Wade! We're done kneeling!"

The truck seems to be stuck in the brush, though, which gives them some time. Daryl grabs these three that were holding him at gunpoint not too long ago, and they take off through the trees and hide behind a thicket of branches. Daryl even gives sandy-hair back his gun - because we all know that Daryl is a sucker for an underdog, especially in an unfair fight.

One man in a flannel shirt and jeans almost comes across their hiding spot, but a walker bites him on the arm. Daryl and company watch as Wade comes up and amputates the guy's arm to save him, and comically tells him to "walk it off."

They decide to let the three go, letting us in on the "payment" they were looking for: "He only wants ass that's willing, you know?" Gross.

The man and woman give the blond girl her insulin, and look at Daryl with new eyes. "Why the hell did you come back?"

He decides to try and lead them back to Alexandria, still recruiting despite Rick's warning. But along the way, blond girl gets bitten in a pretty sick scene where they come across a greenhouse where apparently a few more friends of theirs must have been hiding when they fire they set overwhelmed the forest. There's two bodies that have been sealed into the ground under melted glass.

The blond girl lies between them, crying, to lay some wildflowers on their glass coffins - and the glass breaks, and we see these encased walkers are still very much alive. They bite her, and she's killed. Daryl and the remaining survivors end up burying all three bodies.

Daryl earns a bit more about the price people are paying for safety out here - which is anything. Like their bodies. So he starts asking them the questions:

How many walkers you killed? -The man answers, a couple dozen at least.

How many people you killed? -The man answers, none.

Why? -The man responds, "because if I did, there'd be no going back there. There'd be no going back to how things were."

Daryl tells them that where he's from, people are still like that, and they can find safety. If these two will come with him, they'll meet up with his friends (Sasha and Abraham) who have a car, and he can drive them there.

But Daryl relaxes his guard too much, and gives too much away. As they get back to where he left the bike, and he starts clearing the brush off, he sees the man pull his gun on him in the rearview mirror.

They take his crossbow and his pack - and the bike - and tell Daryl that they're going back to where they came from. They are going back to kneel again.

They throw him some bandages, climb on his bike, and the brunette has the audacity to say, "We're sorry."

"You're gonna be," replies stone-cold Daryl as they take off - and I'm looking forward to seeing these three cross paths again.

So Daryl has lost his signature pieces: his bike and his crossbow. All he's got to show for the last 12 hours or so is the wooden carving he took from this guy.

But Daryl is resourceful. As he goes back to the walker in the bike helmet that he'd been lying beside the day before, he realizes there's a truck covered in underbrush nearby - which will be much more useful right now than the bike.

(Looks like it's a fuel truck, which I can only assume must have crashed/parked there after the fire, or wouldn't it have gone up in flames?)

Daryl drives the truck back to the little town where the shoot-out happened the day before, and picks up Abraham - now looking fancy in a crisp military blazer - and Sasha, who always knew Daryl would come back for them.

As they drive back home, Abraham smiles as he looks in the rearview mirror, and sees there is NO horde of walkers on the road behind them. So that part of the big plan, at least, seems to have worked.

Daryl picks up the radio and tries calling for Rick. All he hears is static - and then what sounds like a voice or voices.

"Say it again," he says.

And as the truck drives on and pulls out of the shot, we hear, "HELP" come clearly over the radio.

--

LAST GASPS

-First and foremost, do we think the voice on the radio is Glenn? Are the fan theories that he rolled under the dumpster more than just theories? And if that IS Glenn, do you think he's been bitten, maybe, so he's not out of the woods yet? I feel like seeing "the bites kill" written on that dry erase board in the office was a not-so-subtle clue.

-Who are Wade and the Kneelers (which would be a great band name)? I haven't gotten that far in the graphic novels yet, but - spoiler alert - poking about online reveals that Rick's group DOES come across The Saviors at about this point in the timeline. The Saviors are a group of underlings controlled by Negan that bully survivors in the surrounding area of their homebase to turn over half of their rations in exchange for protection from walkers. Sound familiar? And one savior named Dwight is especially skilled with a crossbow; perhaps Dwight is the sandy-haired man we met tonight, and we know he now has Daryl's crossbow.

-When do you think Daryl will cross the man and woman's paths again, and what kind of revenge do you hope he takes?

-As for Sasha and Abraham, if they do have feelings for each other - or at least a mutual sexual attraction - where does that leave Rosita, who's worried to tears about Abraham's fate back in Alexandria?